Poor video quality AVCHD render w/ Hardware ATI HD5670

HDbobe

Newbie Joined: Sep 09, 2010 23:12 Messages: 1 Offline

Solved by

Sep 09, 2010 23:48

Upgraded to ATI HD5670 & current drivers - to reduce render times.
The good news: I was able to reduce my render times by a considerable amount!
The bad news: The rendered files now have a noticeable loss of quality!
Original files: Sony AVCHD 1920x1080i 17Mbps
Rendered file: AVCHD 1920x1080i 17Mbps
Rendered with SVRT3 the rendered video output quality looks like the original.
Rendered with Hardware Video Encoder the rendered video quality looks compressed and shows micro blocking during fast movement.
It appears the ATI stream GPU does not do as good of a job with video encoding as the CPU does.
While it's true that the render times are shorter with hardware video encoding, the finished files have a noticeable loss of quality. This makes hardware rendering with PD8 useless to me.
Anyone having better results or any ideas why this is happening?

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Sep 09. 2010 23:50

Kevin66

Newbie Location: Chicago, IL Joined: Aug 23, 2010 12:07 Messages: 29 Offline

Sep 13, 2010 12:17

I have had a similar problem. and agree with your analysis I'm not crazy about the ATI 5670... this is the only component of my system that I went "cheap" on and I'm starting to regret it.

Also, please keep in mind that "hardware/GPU encoding" is a fuzzy science still... I don't believe they have it worked out yet. The results are inconsistent.

At any rate, I plan on swapping my ATI board out with an NVIDIA 460, 1MG in the near future and give CUDA a try. If it's no better, I can always return it. Windows 7 Home Premium - 64 Bit
Intel I7 930 (overclocked 3.6)
RAID 0 WD Caviar Black 2GIG, WD Green 1GIG (Backup)
8 GIG Corsair RAM
NVIDIA 1GIG GTX 460

Davec_Surrey_UK

Newbie Location: Surrey Joined: Feb 07, 2009 05:37 Messages: 33 Offline

Oct 24, 2010 15:05

CUDA is no better, render quality suffers significantly as well. I use PD7 and tried the PD8 trial.....CUDA rendering quality is identical in both versions. The software render in PD7 is actually worse than the CUDA render, so if your happy with SW rendering in PD8 then they must have significantly improved it although I found it sloooow. I did not find SW rendering quality in PD8 that impressive either, it's OK until there's movement or movement/shadow combined? It's a tough one because on my system I can render in real time, but the quality drop makes me wonder whether it's worth it or to move to a better output quality, but slower product.

Interestingly, I am trialling Pinnacle Studio 14 and it's software rendering is almost perfect and indistinguishable from the original AVCHD files, it outputs the same sort of AVCHD HD structure as PD, again it's slow, but not as slow as PD taking approximately 3x real time to render.

It's about time that all the companies realised all of us would happily trade whizzy features for better output quality,I never use, about 80% of the features and effects in power director....if you do, it makes the outputted files look cheap/cheesy.

I was using 1920x1080 30p HD files produced by a Samsung WB2000 (I think it's a TL350 in the US) Intel Quad Core, NV 8800GT, Vista (32bit), Canon Powershot TX1. Editing 1280x720 (p) NTSC 30 fps motion jpeg in .avi container....to AVCHD DVDs for Blu Ray playback